Plenary lecture

Title: Studying Complex Microbial Communities using Data Science Techniques

Professor Niranjan Nagarajan, Computational and Systems Biology, Genome Institute of Singapore, A*STAR

Abstract

That we live in a microbial world is something we have hypothesised and then observed for several centuries now. However, only in the last half a century or so have we come to appreciate the beneficial roles that microorganisms play in various ecosystems and in human health. With the emergence of high-throughput and cost-effective DNA sequencing technologies, the study of entire communities of microbes from various sites is now feasible. However, significant challenges remain in analysing and interpreting this data, including answering questions like, “What are the individual microbes in a community capable of doing?”, “How do they compete or cooperate with other microbes?”, “What does the social network of the microbial community look like?”, and “What are the emergent properties of the microbial ecosystem?”. In this talk, I will highlight how various data science techniques including sequence matching, machine learning and discrete time-series modelling can help answer some of the fundamental questions in this fascinating field of Microbiome studies.

Short biography

Dr. Nagarajan is Associate Director and Senior Group Leader in the Genome Institute of Singapore, and Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine and Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on developing cutting edge genome analytic tools and using them to study the role of microbial communities in human health. His team conducts research at the interface of genetics, computer science and microbiology, in particular using a systems biology approach to understand host-microbiome-pathogen interactions in various disease conditions. Dr. Nagarajan received a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2000, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2006 (Advisor: Prof. Uri Keich). He did his postdoctoral work in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland working on problems in genome assembly and metagenomics (Advisor: Prof. Mihai Pop).